[Greetings, 3DPer! I’m continuing to cross-post appropriate—and useful to You!!—articles from our “HCx3DP Meetup NY” Event Pages from Meetup.com and will do the same with blog posts from our new Health Maker Lab Web site. This latter is now a-building and we will debut it at our next HCx3DP Meetup Wednesday, 22 March. In the meantime, hope you enjoy the following! —LG]

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[The following post was published online at our Next-Event Home Page—and emailed to our Community—on Friday, 17 March 2017, at 5:30 PM. Scroll down for previous posts on this Event.]

Dear Synergist!

Still “unpacking” (figuratively speaking!) from my in-person Inside 3D Printing NY ’17coverage (I3DPNY17) at the Javits Wednesday and Thursday. I’ll update you in person on I3DPNY17 next Wednesday (22 March) evening at our next Meetup! AND, we’ll also unveil our new and a-building

OBTW—Advisory Council members—please make an added effort to join us next Wednesday. LOTS going on. And, you should hear about it all from me…in person. (AND, of course, I’d love your face-to-face feedback!)

In the meantime, here’s more of the BackStory and FrontPage on I3DPNY17:

I worked the Conf/Expo floor both hectic days. Right now, I’m synergizing the vast flow of raw input. The job is to distill rough and disparate ingredients into well-considered, knowledge containers (future posts?) So, the voluminous, omni-sensual and raucous info-feed of the two-day Show ends up in figurative, cut-crystal decanters for your contemplative intoxication…

I’m investing extra effort in making sense of this weather-disrupted event. (About a quarter of the presenters had to scratch; maybe a third of the exhibitors cancelled; and who knows how many attendees were discouraged by the Semi-Blizzard ice-wreckage on the West Side?)

Why study I3DPNY17? I believe DigiFab (and its key component 3DP) ARE accelerating to an inflection point. And—for our HCx3DP and Health Maker Lab (HML) Communities—recognizing, studying and leveraging off this inflection point will make up a VERY important (AND profitable) series of actions. Game-Changing, in a phrase.

These public, pure-3DP-play companies led the hyper-boom of (mostly) consumer-product fervor—at least from the press and citizenry POV. BUT, now they are struggling to recover even a face-saving percentage of their 2014 stock prices. (Ripe for acquisition, says you?!)

The poster child and iconic product for this (inital) “desktop machine era” were respectively Bre Pettis (Co-F & launch/growth leader) of MakerBot and its Replicator 2.

MakerBot was acquired by Stratasys in June 2013. I covered the newser at MakerBot’s HQ when Stratasys publicly embraced its purchase (for $400 Meg: whoa!) I also predicted that the MBot tail would wag the Stratasys dog: wrong!

I3DPNY17—wisely!—chose to divide its Conf program into four, one-word segments. These segment titles summed up the leading areas of the new/accelerating interest in 3DP. These were entitled: METALS, MEDICINE, MANUFACTURING & BUSINESS. Further, Show management taglined the event with: “Strategies For The 3D Ecosystem.”

This positioning statement speaks to an overview approach to a widely established, interconnected, commercial, “living” landscape. Also note that the word “3D” stands alone: not “printing,” “scanning,” “software,” “producing,” etc. To me this says DigiFab is subsuming 3DP. And, correctly describing a real and novel manufacturing geography. A landscape that promises to disrupt and rebuild manufacturing as we know it…

The event’s four topic-headings showcased the commercial vectors that I3DPNY17 believes will lead 3DP out of the doldrums. And, everything I saw, heard and experienced at the Show convinced me—weighted against my four-year study of this industry—that these vectors are the engines of the DigiFab/3DP Renaissance.